Starting a tech community
Takeaways as first time community organizers at DSC Munich
In October 2019, our team started a tech community in Munich with the goal to exchange engaging tech content from students for students. Without any experience in community management, we were thrown into this new challenge. After just 5 months of our DSC’s existence, we have grown to a community of over 300 tech students. Here is what we learned.
Just do it!
We, the Developer Student Club Munich, consist of four Master students: Florian Müller, Berzan Yildiz, Andreas Zimmerer and Viviana Sutedjo. We are part of the first DSC generation in Europe. As such, we were told by our community lead at the time Franziska to “not be afraid and just do it”. So here we were, without a clue what to do but big plans…
Creating a vision
A community starts with a vision: What is the goal of the community? There is a common framework called the 7P’s of community that we answered in our first core team meeting together:
- Purpose: What is the goal of your community?
- People: Who is going to attend your events? Do you have potential event leaders?
- Place: Do you know event spaces you could use? (University rooms, meetup spaces at big tech companies, etc.)
- Participation: How often and in which form do you want members to attend your events?
- Policy: Which rules do you want your members to follow (Code of Conduct)? How can you make sure attendees feel safe in your events?
- Promotion: How can you grow your community and invite new members?
- Performance: What would success look like? Could be number of active members, number of events/annum, number of smiles counted at events:)
Make sure your core team shares these answers so that you are on the same page.
A strong team can make or break a community organization!
Organizing team information
The amount of information that our team has to manage can be overwhelming. That’s why we started organizing everything on Google Drive.
We have regular Core team meetings where we discuss next steps and events, which we backlog in a meeting file. We also document meetings with external contacts and our experiences when attending events ourselves.
For every event we organize, we maintain a separate folder that contains the signup forms, slides, and a photo album that we share afterwards. We have a separate folder for all event templates. Working on Drive enables us to co-work on the slide decks remotely.
Searching for connections
It’s helpful to have a rough plan for potential events before starting your community. We were thankfully invited to a meetup of community organizers where we collected many valuable contacts and exchanged event ideas with experienced organizers. Try to attend as many other community events as you can and talk to the speakers, organizers and team to connect and potentially organize an event for your community!
We also backlogged all contacts and their contact status (contacted, event confirmed etc.) in a Sheets file, which helps keep an overview!
For event brainstorming, we have a rule where we only organize events that we would attend ourselves , to make sure that we put our full efforts into our events.
The launch event
Our first event was a Launch event — attendees could come to learn about our new community, what to expect, and how to sign up (see our slides). As a second point of interest, we invited Google interns to speak about their experiences and give some insights into their internships. If that weren’t enough to convince students to come, we also organized free pizza and beer…
We published it by hanging posters up in the university buildings, and sharing on social media (facebook, twitter, instagram), too. Students were led to a Google Forms signup form for the event.
We expected around 30 attendees, but 150 students signed up…noted:
There’s always a surprise, no matter how well you prepare.
Our new routine for events
At the signup for every event, students can choose to join our newsletter, where we announce our new events and share their signup forms. Our routine for events consists of the following now:
- 1–2 months before an event, we fix a date and place with the speaker and book the room.
- 3 weeks before the event, we finish up the sign-up forms and poster and send around a newsletter email containing them.
- 1 day before the event, we remind all attendees of the event location and time, and what to bring/prepare.
And so it goes…
Just like that, the first five months of being a first-time DSC core team flew by. We have put a lot of work into our community, but meeting all these great people and engaging in countless conversations, it is definitely worth it. There is nothing better than hearing from your attendees that they enjoyed coming and they took something home from the event. So if you have a community idea, follow Franziska’s advice, just do it.
